For more than five years, a team of business leaders, geologists, agricultural experts, and engineers struggled to help two nations – Iraq and Afghanistan – torn apart by decades of war and sanctions, to rebuild their economies.
Reporting to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and working within both the George W. Bush and Barak Obama Administrations, this unorthodox group expanded its operations to encompass efforts in Pakistan, Rwanda, and Sudan.
As the mission unfolded and the team learned how to work effectively in the midst of conflict and hardship, its leaders encountered our federal bureaucracy at war. We discovered how our foreign aid system is ill-equipped to engage in providing economic opportunity to communities emerging from conflict. From these lessons emerged a doctrine – a new approach to foreign assistance that leverages America’s strength – our private sector.
The story of this team, its challenges, its failures, and its triumphs, is now told in the upcoming release “War Front to Store Front: Americans Rebuilding Trust and Hope in Nations Under Fire.”
The book is available for pre-order today. It will be mailed out the day of its official launch – February 18, 2014.
In addition to ordering, we ask that you sign up here for invitations to book launch events and other news alerts.
I hope you will stay in touch, sending me your thoughts on this story that needs to be told.